Academy Award-winning film and stage director, actor, writer and producer who redefined film language with his groundbreaking, critically acclaimed Citizen Kane (1941), considered by many to be the greatest film ever made. His 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds caused a nationwide panic when listeners thought aliens had landed in New Jersey. Welles spent much of his life in a restless pursuit of projects that would fit the measure of his genius and his ego.